


Ghost Story

by Carbocat



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Delusions, Depression, Hallucinations, Head Injury, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Mental Instability, Post-Concussion Syndrome, Post-Stranger Things 3, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:13:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23945260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbocat/pseuds/Carbocat
Summary: He fucking knows that Billy was dead, okay. He knows, but he doesn’t think the shape in the corner knows.The shadow in the corner of the room that wasn’t really there, that was nothing more than the remnant of a nightmare or a sleep deprived hallucination, or some trick of light, didn’t know that Billy was dead. It still thought that it was funny to be Billy shaped, to be a nightmare in his waking hours, haunting him in the most fucked up way.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	Ghost Story

Billy Hargrove died.

He was dead. He was alive. He was _dead, dead, dead_ as a fucking doornail.

Steve stood in his scuffed-up trainers and one of his dad’s stuffy old suits inside of rundown church on the side of town his mother told him never to go to, and he watched Max cry. He clasped his hands in his lap so tight that his knuckles went white and he bowed his head. He watched from the corner of his eye as people lit candles and said prayers, as they took communion like Billy Hargrove did every Sunday since arriving in Hawkins.

He listened to a priest talk about Billy like he was an actual person, telling stories about how Billy was respectable, about how he was responsible, about how he volunteered for the Christmas service and he was opinionated about what the choir sang. He sat there and listened.

He sat, and he watched as Susan held her inconsolable daughter. He watched her wipe away tears that kept falling. He watched Neil Hargrove’s mean face splinter and crack into a grieving father, and he felt hollowed from it. He felt dry on the inside, felt guilty. Like an intrusion shoved beneath the nail.

He followed behind Max, and Neil, and the empty casket out of the church to the rinky-dink cemetery behind it. He watched with a town in mourning as they lowered the last of thirty-eight empty caskets into the ground that summer, and he felt fucking _empty_.

He felt almost bore with it.

But it didn’t matter how he felt, it only mattered that it happened because it made it real.

The cemetery, the empty casket, the whole town in pews mourning a person that they didn’t even know like grief was a group activity – it made it real. It made Billy Hargrove a dead man.

It was a _fact_. He _died._

Barb was dead. Benny Hammond from Benny’s Burgers was dead. Fucking dorky as hell Bob Newby from goddamn _Radioshack_ and Heather Holloway from sixth period French class, and fucking _Chief Hopper_ were dead and there were no bodies to bury for them either. There were only empty caskets.

Hawkins was a town infested with Russians and portals, and too many secrets, too many missing dead, but they _were_ dead. Billy was _dead_ and the portal was closed, and nothing was going to change that again.

He was not coming back just like Heather, and her family, and Hopper, and Bob, and all those fucking Russian mad scientists in that unground base weren’t coming back because they were – he was – he had – it was like there was a pendulum swinging in the back of Steve’s head. Almost violent in its volley.

It was crisscrossing back and forth. It was banging up against the side of his brain until it’d destroyed all other thought, until he felt sick with it, until he could taste the doubt in his mouth like blood.

Dead. _Swing_. Alive. _Swing._

Steve was rolling a stone up the hill in which reality sat pretty and clear, and he watched it fucking _daily_ tumble back down into this stupid denial. It was a _stupid_ hell to live inside of. It was _dumb_. It was so fucking dumb.

Billy was dead.

Steve had been there. He knew what happened and how it happened, and _why_ it happened because he watched it. He was so wrapped up in all this Upside Down bullshit that it fit like a straightjacket and a noose, and he knows that there was a lot of things that you don’t come back from and that was one of them.

Billy was dead.

 _He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead,_ Steve thought to himself, reminding himself so the words tasted on his lips. _He bled out black in the food court at Starcourt Mall on July Fourth. You watched it happen._

Billy was dead, or he wasn’t dead.

 _There wasn’t a body to bury,_ Steve thought to himself.

 _Swing_ , Steve thought. Like a bat full of nails to the roof of his mouth

_Shut up, Steve. Shut up, shut up, shut up._

Billy Hargrove never used to occupy so much space inside of his head.

Some people would say that nothing ever occupied much space inside of Steve’s head, that he was stupid and dumb, and a pretty face that didn’t amount to much. Billy used to say that. Billy used to sit behind him in English class and whisper mean little snide comments about how his essays were a mess and he read like a first grader, and that he was probably going to fail.

There were long periods of time when Steve never thought about Billy, when he didn’t _hear_ the shit that was being thrown at him during English, or on the court, or in the parking lot after school. There were times when Steve barely acknowledged his own existence in this shitty claustrophobic hellscape town, much less notice _Billy Hargrove’s._

They were on the basketball team together and they had gym together, had English together and History. Billy was loud and aggressive at the best of times and violent at the worst. He shoved him down and he called him stupid, but everybody was always calling him stupid and everybody was always an asshole to him.

Billy Hargrove wasn’t fucking special.

He beat Steve’s face into a pulp. He wasn’t special.

There were monsters in Hawkins and there was no moving passed that anymore because they kept coming back bigger and scarier, and they were killing people and cats, and they lived in his backyard. There was a bat in the trunk of his car and new locks on his windows, and there was Barb’s funeral that November. There was Bob’s funeral, and his failed relationship with Nancy, and rejection letters from colleges.

There were so many empty fucking caskets. There were black bodybags on shaky news reports after they shut down Hawkins National Lab. There was so much fucked up shit and Steve wasn’t going to get into college, so he wasn’t getting out, so he was never going to breathe again.

And it was fine. _It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. I’m fine._

He didn’t care about senior year after that November. He didn’t care about being king of a shitty high school in a shitty town, didn’t care about making nice with his shitty friends either. He didn’t _want_ to be on top. He didn’t want to be king. He didn’t give a fuck about Billy Hargrove then and he didn’t now.

Steve sat out the second half of the basketball season his _senior_ year because of the concussion that Billy gave him. He watched one by one as the scouts that were interested in him junior year stopped coming to games, stopped returning his dad’s calls, and gave their scholarships to other people.

He missed school. He got grounded. He failed English. He didn’t even get into tech.

He went to parties were all his keg records were broken. He went to prom and watched the crown he’d been _guaranteed_ since Freshman year go to someone else. He didn’t even win Best Hair in the yearbook that year.

He watched the life that he thought he was supposed to be living, that he was supposed to be happy with get written over by some asshole from California like he’d never been there at all, and he didn’t care. He forced himself not to care about anything.

He didn’t care when he got called stupid and dumb. He didn’t care about all the rejection letters, thirty-six letters and thirty-six noes, and when his dad yelled at him. He didn’t care when his guaranteed job at his father’s company was taken back or when he got a shitty job slinging ice cream to children for two bucks an hour.

He didn’t care when the Mind Flayer came back like he knew it would, didn’t care that he was being dragged back into this Cold War conspiracy bullshit again because he had no plans. Everything was getting worse every time they did this and he only needed to keep everybody safe and it would be fine. It’d be _fine, fine, fine, fine._

He didn’t care when they got dropped halfway to hell in a Russian elevator or when he got tortured and injected with drugs. He didn’t care when they beat him up, when they threatened to cut off his fingers, when Billy Hargrove died a heroic death that he didn’t deserve.

He watched him bleed out.

He thought, _that sucks._ He thought, _that should be me._ He thought, _where’s Hopper?_

Starcourt was a month in his rearview and all the bruising was cleared up, and now.

Now, Billy Hargrove was a cat in a box, suspended between a breath and a death rattle. He was dead and alive. He couldn’t – _no_.

_Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead._

Steve shook his head so hard that he accidently hit it off the headboard, dislodging the unspoken doubt from his tongue with a soft thud. He was alone and even then, he couldn’t admit that he didn’t know.

He didn’t know if Billy was dead.

He saw him die and he still didn’t know.

Steve swallowed hard around the thick taste of tears in his throat and his empty stomach churned uncomfortably. He forced himself into an actuality that made sense. He _saw_ it happen. Billy Hargrove died.

Like Heather died. Like her parents died. Like the silly Russian guy that Joyce sometimes talked about and the whole Anderson family. Like fucking Hopper, who was there and then just gone.

Except that it was different with Billy because Steve watched him die. He had a visual confirmation. He was a _witness_ to the blood pooling underneath Billy’s dirty white wifebeater, to the last words rattled out of his mouth, to the Calvary rushing in too fucking late.

Steve shook his head. He squeezed his eyes shut.

He shook out little white pills from the orange bottle in his hand and his closed his fist around them.

He ignored his hands shaking and how it felt like the shaking was reverberating up his arms. He ignored the soft frayed ends where he scratched the name off the bottle, and the sinking wet feeling in his gut that he was disappointing someone that mattered.

He ignored the vague echo of Robin’s voice inside of his head, telling him that he was being stupid, _Dingus._ Telling him that he was coping badly.

“She’s wrong,” He muttered to himself, to no one because he was alone. He was always alone. His voice still thick with sleep, sounding too loud in the room.

He shouldn’t be awake right now. He didn’t _want_ to be awake.

His window was cracked open even though he didn’t remember doing that and it was dark outside, dark in his room and down the hall. It hadn’t been dark yet when he came home from Family Videos and curled up on top of his blankets, but it was dark now and he had no shoes on, and Robin was still fucking wrong.

Or she wasn’t wrong. It didn’t matter.

Who fucking cared?

He was alone in a house that felt more like a tome than it ever felt like a home. His parents were gone again. Robin was at her house. Billy Hargrove was dead.

Nothing mattered in the same goddamn way that three government cover-ups in two years didn’t matter, the way that three concussions in two years didn’t matter. The way that dizzy spells meant nothing and the ringing his ears that never really went away didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter like Starcourt, in the end, didn’t matter at all. People buried their empty caskets and they called them their dead, and they moved the fuck on knowing nothing about what happened.

Steve’s taken enough trauma to know that you don’t get over. He’s taken enough hits, seen enough bloody teeth, been to enough empty casket funerals to know that nothing on this earth had any fucking meaning and all they were doing was waiting for an even bigger shoe to drop.

Starcourt happened and the Calvary finally showed up with guns and helicopters, and Billy was carted away, loaded up, and never seen again. Starcourt happened and the government was _late_ , and they kept them in makeshift rooms for hours signing papers and answering questions, memorizing a script to tell their parents.

Steve drove Erica and Lucas home first that night. He drove Dustin and then Robin.

He sat in his car outside of her house and she had put her dainty little hand over top of the bandages on his and squeezed a little. It had hurt but it didn’t matter because she had asked with her eyes shiny and her voice wobbly, _do you think you could stay the night? I really don’t want to be alone right now._

He didn’t tell her about concussions and broken ribs, and how he felt fucking _dirty_. He didn’t remind her the government agents told them all to go home and stay there, or that Billy Hargrove was fucking dead. He had nodded his head slowly and had said, _okay._

He didn’t go through the front door that night because her parents were already going to be pissed that their only daughter didn’t come home two days in a row and her workplace collapsed, they’d probably shit bricks if she showed up with a boy in tow. So, he didn’t go through the front door. So, he had waited an hour and then heaved himself up the flower lattice outside of her window and tripped through it.

She had said that she was grounded.

She said that they thought she’d died.

His parents weren’t even in town that weekend. His parents won’t even ask if he was okay when they eventually came home and read all the old newspapers that had gathered on the porch while they were gone. They’d just asked about his job. Where did he expect to get gas money now?

He never told her that and he never would. He just waited until one in the morning for her parents to go to sleep so he could go piss and wash the blood out of his mouth.

He stood in her little pink and blue bathroom with the seashell soap and stared at his reflection. He felt heavy and tired, and then he woke up on a stretcher with Robin crying and her parents yelling, and a paramedic that told him, _the scar isn’t going to be that bad, honey._

He was told later that he’d passed out, his legs went boneless and his whole body sagged, and he clipped the side of the courter where the marble was jagged and broken. He was told that it tore open the skin of his cheek just under his eye, that if it had gone any deeper than he would have severed the muscle and half his face could have been paralyzed.

He was told that the stitches looked cool. He was told that once the swelling around his eyes went down, he’d be able to see it better.

It wouldn’t scar too much, he was told. Honestly.

Steve pressed his fingernails against the calloused jagged line under his eye until it hurt, until the white scar was angry and red, and it didn’t matter. Make it fucking worse, it didn’t matter.

Pretty faces didn’t matter when there wasn’t a brain to back it up.

It didn’t matter like Billy Hargrove, and concussions, and his mother crying about his cheek. It didn’t matter about the dizziness that wouldn’t leave and slow response times, and the neurologist in Chicago that sat with his hand son his knees and told him that there were some injuries that we don’t come back from.

Steve had asked then with a mouth full of blood from his bitten tongue, “Like having your heart ripped out of your chest?”

He’d laughed. He’d fucking cried.

He didn’t say a goddamn thing when his dad yelled at him in the car about it. He didn’t say anything about the blurry vision that wasn’t fading and the ringing in his ears, and when he was asked if he understood what the doctor meant when he said things like _post-concussion syndrome,_ and _permanent damage,_ and his dad swearing about _all those fucking fights, Steven._

It didn’t matter. He didn’t care.

If anything, it made everything better.

If the blurry vision lasted forever and he stayed dizzy for the rest of his life, and if he never got his car keys back, it was better. It was better if his dad kept making jokes about him being slow, and if he forgot sometimes what he was doing and how the rewind machine worked. It was better with all the fucking migraines and Billy Hargrove dying to save the world and him not, because – because it meant that he had a reason.

He had a reason why he was failing so fucking much. He had a reason why he let someone die on his watch and why would Max burst into tears sometimes, and why he was a loser working a medial job for fucking _Keith._

He didn’t have to be someone important or smart, or _anything_ because he was damaged. He had brain damage. He helped save the world and he had the fucking scars to prove it.

He thought once that if the Upside Down came back, if they had to crawl back into that hole in the ground than he’d go alone. He’d bring his bat and he’d tell everybody, _don’t worry. I’ll hold them off. Get out of here._

It was kind of funny that the only thing that he was ever good at was something that Ronald Reagan would kill him for if he told anybody. He’d be written off as crazy if he ever said anything, which was fine. He had brain damage now and Billy Hargrove was the goddamn hero.

He didn’t care. He didn’t care. He didn’t –

“Fuck.”

A pill slipped through his fingers, getting lost in the unmade bed. _Damn it._

He didn’t care.

“I need the pills,” he said, shaking out another from the bottle before putting the cap back onto it. He shoved it in the space between the mattress and his headboard where he used to keep Playboys in another lifetime. Steve ignored himself.

He had glasses now.

They were supposed to be on his nightstand because he left them there but when he squinted at it, he couldn’t make out the thin wire frames. He could have left them on the coffee table in the living room or the kitchen even though he didn’t remember going to either of those rooms when he got home. He was always leaving things places he never was.

Maybe he left them in Robin’s mom’s minivan.

Maybe he was telling the truth to himself, to no one. Maybe he did actually need these pills like he needed the anxiety medication on the sink in the bathroom or the migraine medication by the front door, or the whiskey he kept on his bedside table.

Sometimes when he woke up, there would just be – breathing. This labored heavy, _wet_ sound heaving itself into the room like a humid day, like a cemetery when fresh dirt was dug up. 

Sometimes it was him.

Sometimes he’d wake up with his teeth clenched so tight that it felt like his jaw was breaking and the tail ends of a nightmare still had its people-metal arms wrapped around him, but sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes he’d hold his breath until his chest hurt and squeeze his eyes shut, and he’d _feel_ it on his skin like a cold feathery touch. Breathing.

Sometimes, he’d feel hands.

Sometimes, the pills were gone and there’s no one there but him.

The dosage on the bottle says to take two but it also used to say Karen Wheeler, so he took three.

He was haunted by this sickly earthy damp smell that seeped into the room through the window that he kept remembering to close but never remembered opening, a mix of fresh dirt and chlorine, grime and chlorophyll. It swept into the room in waves, tickling up Steve’s spine like the flower-faced teeth of a Demogorgon. It told him… Billy Hargrove was dead.

In the space between the closet and total darkness, Billy Hargrove was dead.

He was dead. He was not dead. He was not here. He was a ghost.

He bled out on the goddamn floor and Steve watched it happen. He watched the heroic save, watched the whispered goodbye, watched the Calvary cart his body off to be experimented on or destroyed, and it should have been him. It should have been his sacrifice but it wasn’t so he knows.

He fucking _knows_ that Billy was dead, okay. He knows, but he doesn’t think the shape in the corner knows.

The shadow in the corner of the room that wasn’t really there, that was nothing more than the remnant of a nightmare or a sleep deprived hallucination, or some trick of light, didn’t know that Billy was dead. It still thought that it was funny to be Billy shaped, to be a nightmare in his waking hours, haunting him in the most fucked up way.

 _It’s not really there,_ he thought. _He died. You know that._

He knew that his eyes were fucked up now and that he couldn’t see shit passed the distanced of his extended hand, and that he couldn’t even drive anymore. He knew that the shape in his room was just a shadow, that it wasn’t Billy, but the shade had eyes.

There was this gleam in the darkness that could be moonlight through thin curtains reflecting off a glassy-eyed stare, but Steve couldn’t see shit anymore, so he knew. He knew that it wasn’t really there, that it couldn’t be because Billy was dead and the shape was just a shadow, and Steve was going crazy because he was _brain damaged_ and stealing pills out of his ex-girlfriend’s medicine cabinet.

If he opened his eyes. If he stared into the abyss that was already staring at him than he could trick himself into imagining translucent gray skin, hollowed cheeks, lips pinks and gnawed raw. If he squinted and gave into his own hallucination than sometimes he thought that he could see blue eyes watching him, piercing him, _stabbing_ him with a cold dead judgement.

Steve licked his lips and he told the ghost, “They’re prescription.”

He stole them from Karen Wheeler’s medicine cabinet when he was still driving Dustin to D&D, before his parents took his keys. Before that, they were some pills that he bought off Tommy’s drug dealing older brother behind the Quickmart for twenty bucks.

He had waited his whole lunchbreak for the promise of a tranquilizer so strong that they’d knock him out for a whole day. He’d pocketed the pills and handed over the money, had smiled with his sunglasses on, and told him that if they didn’t work than Hawkins would have an actual body to bury this summer.

He’d patted Tommy’s brother on the back and say, _see you around, man._

Those pills were in his jacket pocket.

He said to the ghost, the shadow, “These are mine.”

He said, “Don’t take them, I need them.”

He said, “You’re not really here.”

He was lying to a ghost.

He was lying to a figment of his cruel imagination, of stupid sleep deprivation and pills, and his poor coping mechanisms, pathetically still wearing his vest from Family Video. He wondered what the neurologist would say if he told him that he was hallucinating the dead.

He kind of wanted to laugh.

He kind of wanted to tell the ghost that his mom would start crying big fat tears if she thought her son was now stupid, ugly, _and_ crazy. He wanted to but he didn’t.

He kept his eyes on the shadow, watching the shadow as it watched back, and he pressed pill after pill, after pill into his mouth. He swallowed them dry.

He tried to smile.

“They’re helping me,” He told the ghost.

“Billy went to church,” He told the ghost. “He was buried there.”

He was a fucking liar.

The pills weren’t helping shit. The church cemetery was full of empty graves.

He should turn on the light. He should turn on every light in the house until there was no room for shadows, so he didn’t have hallucinate Schrodinger’s bully. _Billy was dead. He was alive. He was here. He was a ghost._

Steve should put on his glasses and get to his goddamn feet. He should run like he has always ran away. He should call Robin, call Nancy, call Tommy, or the goddamn police about the demons haunting him from beyond the dead. He should take more pills, take all of them, should overdose and join Billy on his plane of existence.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry.

“It’s fuckin’ hilarious,” He said to _nobody_ because ghosts didn’t fucking exist, and Billy Hargrove wasn’t alive. “It’s funny. It’s – it’s pathetic, man. It’s so fucking sad.”

“I don’t even know why I’m talking to you, you’re not real,” He shook his head. He had felt relieved when Billy dropped to the ground at the food court and bled to death, and then he felt jealous. He felt eaten up with a bitterness.

It made him a shitty person, he knew that. If it wasn’t him than it was Billy and that was good too because that meant that things were over. The kids were safe now. Things were supposed to get better.

Steve pressed his fingernails to the scar under his eye again, pressing against the thick twisted skin. He felt like scratching at it until the scar was gone and was bleeding again. He felt like digging into his face until he was on the other side and screaming until the whole world heard him, _it’s not okay. It’s not okay. It’s not okay._

“I’m fine,” He lied. He laughed. He saw monsters with faces that opened like flowers in bloom. He saw stars, and closed fists, and monsters followed him into his sleep. He opened his eyes and tears blurred the ghost into nothing but shadows in a dark room. He spat at it anyways, “You’re not real. You’re not here.”

He felt like he forgot to close the door once and the dead followed him inside, “You died.”

He wasn’t awake when they put the stitches in his face, but he pretended that he could feel the needle piercing his skin. He pretended that he could feel the presence of the Mind Flayer inside of him like a USS Butterscotch brain freeze, like a cold icy shower, directing him.

He pretended that the lull in his chest and the heaviness of his head was something other than the pills starting to work. He pretended that it wasn’t a pull towards unconsciousness that he was feeling but Billy Hargrove outside The Byers’ house, hands wrapped in his jacket and pulling him forward only to shove him back.

He felt breath on his cheek as sleep trudged his thoughts into molasses, soft feather hands on his shoulder and he knew that it wasn’t there. He felt sleep like the yawning mouth of a grave and he fell into it.

**Author's Note:**

> Back at it again with another sad Steve Harrington fic.
> 
> More to come.


End file.
